 News | Forum | People | FAQ | Links | Search | Register |
Log in |
|
|
I had a discussion on Discord recently about how old the Quake-levels are supposed to be, or what age, if any, they are supposed to represent. There are so many conflicting architectural styles in them that they are hard to place, but due to their seemingly low-tech appearance with a dependency on magical(?) elements for things like lighting, one could say at youngest they'd be from the 1800's, and to the oldest, maybe millions, even billions of years old?
Are they just a refraction of human history over the years that they have taken in through rifts in time, or portals, or has id Software already explained this somewhere? I don't know about the castles or the temples, but i think the base maps are from the 50s because of the huge computers they have in there (i know that in the 40s these computers already existed, but the color tv was invented in the 50s and we can see color monitors in the game).
And, since Nikola Tesla claimed to have invented a "death beam" (a huge electric power weapon) in the 1930s, i think the military could used this time to improve the weapon and make a more compact version (that we know in the game as the lightning-gun) So yeah, to me, the quake campaign/story is happening in the 50s... The episode 4 places were already ancient by the time the numerous castles in the Realm of Black Magic were being built.
The runic maps could possibly be from an even earlier time, since it's kind of supposed to be the equivalent of Hell itself. The age is irrelevant since those places aren't in Earth. Only the base maps are.
Each base has a teleporter to another dimension. The E*M2 maps are actually the first map of each dimension. The E*M1 maps are still in Earth. E1M2➡E1M3➡E1M4➡E1M5 are physically connected through doorways, so they're all in the same planet. All of the runic maps (including E1M6, E1M7 & E1M8) are connected through teleporting portals, IIRC. Given the amount of runic maps, it should be safe to assume that at least most of them are in a single planet. E1M8 could be in a lower-gravity planet, though. The age is irrelevant since those places aren't in Earth
Not even the dimension which contains the Rune of Earth Magic? id software put about as much thought into the age of the quake "castles" (or whatever) as they put into the story you'll find in the printed booklet.
"While scouting the neighborhood, you hear shots back at the base. Damn, that Quake bastard works fast!" Tolkien-level world-building, this ain't. One of Quake's game designs was about enemies invading from fantasy/fairytale worlds. Thus the ogre, knights and the cancelled dragon. Later on this was mixed with Lovecraftian horror, and zombies.
They put a lot of thought on the story, but not enough to make it cohesive when cutting features. It seems that there is some rather Quake-inspired architecture in the upcoming DooM. I wonder if they intend to blend the universes to make them all belong to one.
NanoQuake YouTube trailer
NanoQuake is an implementation of Yamagi Quake 2 with Nano based transactions and customisations built in. The server which hosts the game has its own Nano account which each player pays into (currently set to a 0.1 Nano buy-in). For each kill you gain a reward of Nano and at the end of the round 3rd place gets 10%, 2nd place gets 30% and 1st place gets the rest. You don't need to pay to play in the games however you only get a payout if you've paid in. New - There is a mini faucet built into the main servers now, each player receives 0.01 Nano if they have 3 or more frags. Source /sarcasm hmm, a bit of a nonsense gimmick but sure
my favorite quake 2 mp project is http://www.coopordie.com Cool little concept, I do wish more decent oldschool SP / coop games implemented a neat world server / persistent data thingy like this one. These things were well more difficult and costly to implement back then in the day, an idea for the wave of "retro" modern games and beyond I see a lot of people here saying that Dusk sucks, that game sucks, this modern sucks, etc. So, 2019: what are the essential mods/maps that one should play with Quake? And what engine? What would you install on someone's PC to enjoy Quake?
Darkplaces + AD? That's it? Quakespasm is the engine recommended by most people here, including me.
Go here: https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/ Sort by User Score. You also might want to prioritise the newer stuff too. A map rated 4.5 / 5 in 1997 probably isn't going to compare to a 4.5 from 2017 :p dumptruck's recommendation videos are quite good.
https://youtu.be/L17bDzkctCY https://youtu.be/8SiSHzeHFYY Avoid darkplaces like the plague that it is. The effects and tweaks and stuff are very much out of place in the rest of Quake's aesthetics.
As for the rest......yes. Go get all the top rated maps in the last 22 years ;) Karl Popper famously said: “All life is problem solving.” No theory of consciousness is necessary to define the objectives of a general problem solver. From an AGI point of view, consciousness is at best a by-product of a general problem solving procedure.
I must admit that I am not a big fan of Tononi's theory. The following may represent a simpler and more general view of consciousness. Where do the symbols and self-symbols underlying consciousness and sentience come from? I think they come from data compression during problem solving. Let me plagiarize what I wrote earlier [1,2]: While a problem solver is interacting with the world, it should store the entire raw history of actions and sensory observations including reward signals. The data is ‘holy’ as it is the only basis of all that can be known about the world. If you can store the data, do not throw it away! Brains may have enough storage capacity to store 100 years of lifetime at reasonable resolution [1]. As we interact with the world to achieve goals, we are constructing internal models of the world, predicting and thus partially compressing the data history we are observing. If the predictor/compressor is a biological or artificial recurrent neural network (RNN), it will automatically create feature hierarchies, lower level neurons corresponding to simple feature detectors similar to those found in human brains, higher layer neurons typically corresponding to more abstract features, but fine-grained where necessary. Like any good compressor, the RNN will learn to identify shared regularities among different already existing internal data structures, and generate prototype encodings (across neuron populations) or symbols for frequently occurring observation sub-sequences, to shrink the storage space needed for the whole (we see this in our artificial RNNs all the time). Self-symbols may be viewed as a by-product of this, since there is one thing that is involved in all actions and sensory inputs of the agent, namely, the agent itself. To efficiently encode the entire data history through predictive coding, it will profit from creating some sort of internal prototype symbol or code (e. g. a neural activity pattern) representing itself [1,2]. Whenever this representation becomes activated above a certain threshold, say, by activating the corresponding neurons through new incoming sensory inputs or an internal ‘search light’ or otherwise, the agent could be called self-aware. No need to see this as a mysterious process — it is just a natural by-product of partially compressing the observation history by efficiently encoding frequent observations. [1] Schmidhuber, J. (2009a) Simple algorithmic theory of subjective beauty, novelty, surprise, interestingness, attention, curiosity, creativity, art, science, music, jokes. SICE Journal of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers, 48 (1), pp. 21–32. [2] J. Schmidhuber. Philosophers & Futurists, Catch Up! Response to The Singularity. Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 19, Numbers 1-2, pp. 173-182(10), 2012. PC Gamer interview with Tim Willits on the making of Quake 2
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/the-making-of-quake-2/ An interesting read. They seriously considered making it into a new franchise, potentially called "Wor". I didn't know that. In so many ways Quake 2 was a step forward, but for some reason it never really connected with me. I think it's going to be hard to go back to now. |
|
|
|
|
|
| You must be logged in to post in this thread. |
|
| Website copyright © 2002-2024 John Fitzgibbons. All posts are copyright their respective authors. |